Free Speech According to the Left

On Tuesday afternoon an Israeli academic was shouted down by two dozen protesters as he tried to begin a lecture before about 100 students and faculty at the University of Minnesota. The speaker was Moshe Halbertal, a professor at NYU Law School and a professor of Jewish thought and philosophy at Hebrew University.

Dr Halbertal had been invited by the university to give the lecture, and after the disruption, he was able to proceed.

The gang of protestors bragged about it.

Today, this apologist for Zionist war crimes spoke only sporadically, as his lies were interrupted again and again by protesters who refused to listen to his anti-Palestinian hate speech.

And not only that. This gang did their best to deny everyone else their right to listen to the speech. The right of those others to determine for themselves what they will listen to is strictly in the hands of this gang. Free speech, according to these, is limited to the freedom to speak or to hear only that which these personally approve.

The silence of the rest of the Left—not even the Star Tribune, a newspaper local to the region, spent any column inches on the thing—is clear: the Left as a whole agrees with this view that only speech of which the Left approves may be freely spoken.

What HRC Knew

…about blaming the murders of our Ambassador in Libya and three of his security team on a video at the time she was busily blaming those murders on that video….

An email was sent from her Libyan Embassy to her State Department shortly after those murders. Of course, the email’s sender and recipient(s) have been carefully redacted by John Kerry’s State Department.

The film’s not as explosive of an issue here as it appears to be in other countries in the region. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the series of events in Benghazi was much more terrorist attack than a protest, which escalated into violence.

It is our opinion that in our messaging, we want to distinguish, not conflate, the events in other countries with this well planned attack by militant extremists.

Two days later, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice did her trick on five Sunday news/talk shows claiming the video made the “protestors” do it.

Remember this duplicity in a year.

Religious Bigotry in our High Schools

Bremerton, WA, High School football assistant coach Joe Kennedy has been suspended from coaching his high school football teams because after each game he leads a voluntary prayer session with his players and others wishing to join in at the 50 yard line.

The school district says it’s afraid of being seen as endorsing religion. It prefers, instead, to be seen as banning religion.

While the district appreciates Kennedy’s many positive contributions to the [Bremerton] football program, Kennedy’s conduct poses a genuine risk that the district will be liable for violating the federal and state constitutional rights of students or others[.]

This is plainly bogus. No one is forced to participate in the prayer sessions. They occur after school functions—like the football game—have ended. According to the players themselves, he doesn’t even invite them to participate: he just does his thing, and the players on their own initiative join in. Or don’t.

It gets…better. As part of Kennedy’s suspension, Superintendent Aaron Leavell told him what else he’s not allowed to do.

He was also ordered to avoid kneeling, bowing his head, or doing anything that could remotely be seen as religious.

And

Leavell had offered to let the coach engage in “private prayer” following the football games—provided no child could see the coach petitioning the Almighty[.]

Because Christianity and being Christian are such shameful things, apparently, that they need to be kept hidden away in a back bedroom.

It’s interesting, too, that Kennedy has been doing these private, voluntary prayer sessions since 2008, yet “the school district” says it only just noticed them.

That’s such blatant nonsense that it’s a clear indication of the level of integrity with which the district is approaching this problem which it’s created.

The Obama Administration and Racism

[Ally Financial Inc] agreed to pay borrowers at least $80 million to settle allegations of racial or ethnic discrimination….

This is the settlement that Obama’s CFPB and DoJ browbeat Ally into accepting. There’s a catch, though:

the lender is prohibited by law from collecting data on the race or ethnicity of its borrowers.

But never mind. Obama and his Executive Branch minions cried racism, and so it must exist, regardless of actual data.

Unfortunately, though, Obama isn’t alone in this sorry charade. Ally management shares shame in this tragedy: they cravenly agreed to a penalty for something they didn’t do, or at least the government persecutors had no hope of demonstrating.

Cnut

Catholic leaders—”representatives of bishops conferences from around the globe”—have produced a document urging climate “negotiators” meeting in Paris next month to stop global climate change. The Catholics’

10-point proposal calls for governments to approve legally binding limits to global average temperatures, set a mid-century decarbonization goal….

Never mind that humanity has no control over global temperature; indeed, climate-related temperature variations have been demonstrated to be closely linked to the sun’s output variability, and the variability of the Earth’s (and Moon’s) orbital behaviors. Never mind, too, that atmospheric CO2 is plant food, without which we’d have no hope of feeding our multitudes; that when atmospheric CO2 was orders of magnitude higher in earlier epochs, life on Earth was lush; and never mind that significant changes in atmospheric CO2 are trailing indicators confirming the increasing health of Earth from the burgeoning life exhaling all that CO2 and alternatively confirming the ailing of Earth as life decreased in the face of cooling and Ice Ages, and so exhaling less CO2 into the atmosphere.

It’s amazing to me that Catholic leadership should commit so blatant a sin of arrogance. They would do well to learn from King Cnut’s example, wherein he attempted to stop the tide as a demonstration to his subjects of the limits of mere human power.